Avian Encounters: Bird/Human Relations Session with Simon van Schalkwyk | October 5, 4-5pm SAST
You are warmly invited to the nineth session in a new seminar series on Monday 05 October 4-5pm SAST
Avian Encounters: Bird/Human Relations
Convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
Unpicking the Tarmac: The Weird, the Eerie, and Avian Anomalies in Zero Summer
Presented by : Simon van Schalkwyk
Please find Paper here and Zoom link here
This presentation argues that the avian imagery in the poetry collection Zero Summer functions as a series of hauntological figures, manifesting as either “weird” presences or “eerie” absences. To this end, it understands details such as a red bishop flying in time with an automobile’s wing-mirror, or apocalyptic seagulls unpicking tarmac bit by bit as weird manifestations of presence where the non-human world asserts its sovereign, strange agency. In turn, it regards the collection’s increasing preoccupation with avian absence as eerie intimations of a future in which organic life has been erased and replaced by its ghostly technological simulation. The birds in Zero Summer act less as images of abjection, anthropomorphized analogies for the figure of the poet, or as more optimistic “lines of flight” capable of disturbing molar or molecular modes of order. They act instead as material anomalies, crucially anchored within a distinctly Southern hemispheric landscape, that serve to punctuate mood-scapes of anxiety and hysteria familiar to an era of ecological precarity and mass extinction.
Simon Van Schalkwyk is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has formerly held a Visiting Researcher position at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and he has acted as co-editor for Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies and as academic editor for the Johannesburg Review of Books. His first academic monograph, Robert Lowell's Cold War Imitations: Containment, Leakage, Anarchy was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2025 and his first collection of poetry, Transcontinental Delay, was published by Dryad Press in 2021. Zero Summer (Dryad press, 2026) is his second collection.
In an age of extinction, partial adaption and survival, what would a better understanding of the lives of birds afford us – and perhaps them? Unlike humans, birds travel anywhere, sing in a manner no other animal can and hear sound at distances undetectable to us. They forge or disavow encounters with humans that suggest complex relationalities. How to bridge the bird/human divide, drawing on the strengths of the humanities? Birds have been overfreighted with human meaning: as messengers of the gods, harbingers of the seasons, symbols of captivity and freedom, portentous flocks – not to mention the perspectives of the hunter, the cook, the meat-eater, the pet-owner, the ornithologist, the farmer, the birder. Yet, are there more flight-enabled perspectives* that shift us away those above? What is the birdness of birds - and how are they seen to embody their own lives? What might a history of the grey parrot tell us – about parrots and about us? What do art works using bird acoustics reveal? How do birds redefine geographies of air, water and land? What can film and other media learn from avian perceptual worlds and modes of seeing and looking? How are bird migrations changing with climate change? This series approaches these and other avian-inflected questions with a particular interest in African and Indian-Ocean oriented archives and hemispheric media drawn from literature, science studies, climate sciences, migration studies, and visual and film studies.
*With thanks to Olga Petri and Michael Guida (Winged Worlds Common Spaces of Avian-Human Lives, 2023) for this phrase
Avian Encounters: Bird/Human Relations follows three previous highly subscribed Series, Heated Conversations; Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres; and Plant Lives: Critical Plant Humanities from the global South, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall